China s Dormant and Active Social Volcanoes · China’s Dormant and Active Social Volcanoes Martin...

China’s Dormant and ActiveSocial Volcanoes

Martin King Whyte

A B S T R A C T

China’s leaders often claim that the rising tide of mass protests in recent years is primarilydriven by popular anger over the widening gap between rich and poor. However, in a seriesof national surveys that I helped direct, it becomes clear the average Chinese citizen is lessangry about current income gaps than citizens in many other societies. There also is no clearincrease in such anger over time (despite a sustained rise in income inequality). The primarydrivers of popular anger lie elsewhere—primarily in power inequalities, manifested in abusesof power, official corruption, bureaucrats who fail to protect the public from harm, mistreat-ment by those in authority, and inability to obtain redress when mistreated. China’s leadershave done an impressive job in recent years of addressing poverty and material inequality,thus keeping the distributive injustice social volcano dormant. However, they have so farbeen unwilling or unable to make fundamental reforms to address procedural injustices.Unless they can provide Chinese citizens with more effective protections from the arbitrar-iness and abuses of entrenched power, a shared sense of injustice will persist, and this activevolcano will continue to smolder, with the potential to erupt and threaten Party rule.

By most indicators, including sustained and rapid economic growth, raisedliving standards, and reductions in mass poverty, China’s transition from a

centrally planned socialist economy to a primarily market-driven system after1978 has been extraordinarily successful. However, that success has not trans-lated into the “harmonious society” that Hu Jintao, the previous leader of theChinese Communist Party, made a primary goal. Instead, Chinese society in re-cent times has seen increasing eruptions of popular discontent and mass protests.Some observers have characterized the current situation as “rocky stability.”1

Others, including analysts within China and even Party leaders themselves, fearthat a rising tide of popular discontent and of activist protests against the statusquo may eventually threaten the entire political order and Party rule.2 The sud-

2. Although there is considerable debate about the accuracy and comparability of the figures cited on massprotests in China over the years, there is little doubt that they have become increasingly common and occa-

1. Steven Jackson, “Introduction: A Typology of Stability and Instability in China,” in Is China Unstable?,ed. David Shambaugh (Armonk: Sharpe, 2000).

Electronically published November 20, 2015

The China Journal, no. 75. 1324-9347/2016/7501-0002. Copyright 2015 by The Australian National University. All rights reserved.

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10 • THE CHINA JOURNAL , No. 75

den and unexpected collapse of Communist Party rule in Eastern Europe and theSoviet Union in 1989–91 and the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 that initiallyparalyzed the Party still haunt China’s leaders today, producing nightmares of a“social volcano” of popular protests erupting and sweeping the Party into thedustbin of history.

The Party is determined to prevent such an eruption, and to avoid that pos-sibility China’s leaders have adopted a wide range of measures designed both toreduce popular discontent and to control outbreaks of mass protest when they dooccur. However, in identifying the discontent that threatens their rule, China’sleaders place primary emphasis on the rise in income inequality, which this ar-ticle will show is a dormant social volcano that poses little threat to the regime. Atthe same time, the Party fails to grapple systematically and seriously with a muchmore dangerous set of problems (what I refer to as China’s active social volcano).National surveys in which I participated indicate that unless China’s leaders di-rect their attention to this active volcano of discontent and can find ways to re-duce it, they are unlikely to be able to maintain even “rocky stability” indefinitely.In the pages that follow, I present evidence that the dominant analysis of populardiscontent is misguided,3 indicate where I think the more serious threats to Partyrule lie, and discuss why the leaders have so far been unwilling or unable to focusmore effectively on those threats.

ON DORMANT AND ACTIVE SOCIAL VOLCANOES IN CHINA

In any society, popular anger over injustices is a necessary, although not suffi-cient, precondition for destabilizing the prevailing political order.4 There are dif-

sionally involve large numbers of protestors and episodes of violence. Available sources cite a total of 8,700such mass protests nationally in 1993, 87,000 in 2005, and 180,000–200,000 annually in recent years. For ananalysis of major sources of mass protest activities, see Jae Ho Chung, Hongyi Lai, and Ming Xia, “MountingChallenges to Governance in China: Surveying Collective Protestors, Religious Sects, and Criminal Organi-zations,” The China Journal, no. 56 (July 2006): 1–31.

3. My use of the term “misguided” does not mean that I think official efforts to reduce income inequalitiesare undesirable but rather that such inequalities are not the primary source of popular discontent.Therefore, reducing the gaps, however desirable for other reasons, will not help make China a more harmo-nious society or a more stable political order.

4. There is no simple formula by which popular discontent that rises above level X produces regime change.The literature on social movements makes clear that a large number of other conditions affect whether or notdisruption of the political status quo and regime change will occur, including the solidarity, resources, andleadership of challengers; skill at framing the popular discourse; and the strength, solidarity, and determinationof the existing leadership. Moreover, as Mao Zedong recognized in this realm long ago, “a single spark can starta prairie fire” (an image that haunted China’s leaders after the events in Tunisia that touched off the ArabSpring movement). My contention here is simply that the more widespread and intense the popular anger oversocial injustice, the more difficult it will be for the leadership to maintain their rule. Given this assumption, it isimportant to assess what issues Chinese citizens are most and least angry about and whether the policies andpractices of the Party seem well suited to deal with and reduce the primary sources of popular anger.


China’s Dormant and Active Social Volcanoes • 11

ferent types of injustices that may anger ordinary citizens. Since the launch of the“develop the West” campaign in 2000 by Party Secretary Jiang Zemin, China’sleaders have primarily focused on the potential threat to their rule posed by pop-ular anger over the rising income gaps that have accompanied post-1978 marketreforms. Subsequent Party leaders up to and including Xi Jinping have adopted awide variety of measures designed to shift away from the emphasis on growthat all costs during the 1980s and 1990s toward more equitable growth. In otherwords, China’s leaders (and most commentators) have seen distributive injusticeas the primary source of rising popular anger. They have launched multiple ini-tiatives (to be discussed later) to try to avoid the eruption of a potential socialvolcano due to the widening gaps between rich and poor. However, my surveysin China, to be reviewed here, clearly indicate that the distributive injustice socialvolcano has long been and remains dormant.

However, indignation over distributive injustice is not the only or the most im-portant threat the Party confronts. As in other societies, another primary type ofunfairness that ignites popular anger is injustice stemming from power rather thanincome inequality—where citizens receive unjust treatment from those in author-ity, become aware that officials abuse their positions for private gain, suffer becausethose in power fail to fulfill their obligation to protect the public, or feel unable toobtain redress when treated unjustly (or even get into worse trouble if they try). Inthis analytical distinction, distributive injustices involve differences in wealth andincome that are perceived as unfair, while procedural injustices involve unfair ad-vantages held by the powerful and vulnerability and mistreatment of the power-less.5 I contend that China faces an active social volcano involving popular angerover such procedural or political injustices, which poses a much greater threat tostability and Party rule than the distributive injustice social volcano.

TRENDS IN INCOME INEQUALITY IN THE REFORM ERA

The fact that income gaps in China have grown steadily is not in dispute. Chinawent from having quite moderate income inequality, with a Gini index under0.30 in the early 1980s, to a much more unequal distribution of 0.49 in 2007

5. Obviously this distinction between distributive and procedural injustice gets fuzzy at higher ranges of thestratification order, since many Chinese in positions of power and members of their families have used theirstatus to become very wealthy. On the other side of the ledger, to some extent those who become very richthrough business ventures with no family connections may use their wealth to gain influence among the po-litical elite, although this is a less prevalent phenomenon than in most other societies. (A recent Pew ResearchCenter comparative survey found that 38 percent of Chinese citizens surveyed felt that rich people have toomuch influence in their political system, in contrast to a median of 64 percent who expressed this view in the 34emerging and developing countries included in the study; see http://www.pewglobal.org/2015/02/12/discontent-with-politics-common-in-many-emerging-and-developing-nations/.) Despite these crossover effects, or-dinary citizens generally can distinguish whether a particular instance of perceived injustice reflects powerexercised unfairly versus unfairly obtained wealth.



(see fig. 1).6 By this measure, China had sharper income inequality in 2007 thansuch societies as the United States and Russia. (It was not as sharp, though, asin some other countries not included in fig. 1, such as Brazil and South Africa,where estimates of the Gini index approach 0.60.) Since some analysts claim thatwhen Gini surpasses 0.40 a country enters a “danger zone” for social unrest andpolitical turbulence,7 the trend line for China has fueled dire predictions.

There is ongoing debate about what the trend in income distribution has beensince 2007. According to Ma Jiantang of China’s National Bureau of Statistics,the national Gini peaked in 2008–9 at 0.49 but then started to decline slightly,reaching 0.47 in 2012.8 However, other China surveys since 2010 point to a con-tinued rise in income inequality. Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou estimate the Gini is inthe 0.53–0.55 range,9 and another survey directed by Gan Li and associates led toan even higher 2010 estimate of 0.61, which if accurate would equal or surpassthe levels of the most unequal countries in the world.10 Regardless of how thisdebate is resolved, it does not affect the primary trend: Chinese citizens havehad to adapt to a sharp change—from living in a society with relatively modestincome inequality to one with very large gaps.

Moreover, the income gap between rural residents and migrants versus urbancitizens, while already large during the Mao era, has grown substantially and isprobably wider than in any other country (with China’s urban/rural householdincome ratio at least 3:1 and, depending on assumptions used in the calculation,perhaps more than 4:1 in 2007).11 The rising incomes of the nouveaux richeshave resulted in very conspicuous consumption, with lavish mansions, fancy for-eign automobiles, expensive night clubs, exclusive golf and polo clubs, privatejets, and foreign travel and education. Meanwhile, a portion of China’s popula-tion, particularly in rural areas, remains mired in abject poverty; millions havelost jobs and have had to cope with unemployment; and rising costs for higher

6. In fig. 1 the estimates for China in 1988 and later come from the China Household Income ProjectSurveys (see Li Shi, Hiroshi Sato, and Terry Sicular, eds., Rising Inequality in China: Challenges to a Harmo-nious Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The remaining figures come from the UNU-WIDER World Income Inequality Database, Version 2.0c (May 2008), available at http://www.wider.unu.edu/research/Database/en_GB/database/.

7. See, e.g., Josephine Ma, “Wealth Gap Fueling Instability, Studies Warn,” South China Morning Post,December 22, 2005.

8. Yang Lina, “Gini Coefficient Release Highlights China’s Resolve to Bridge the Wealth Gap,” Xinhuanet,January 21, 2013, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-01/21/c_132116852.htm.

9. Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou, “Income Inequality in Today’s China,” Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences, April 28, 2014, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1403158111.

10. Cited in Ernest Kao, “China’s Wealth Gap Continues to Widen,” South China Morning Post, Decem-ber 10, 2012. See discussion of these competing estimates in Martin K. Whyte, “Soaring Income Gaps: Chinain Comparative Perspective,” Daedalus 143, no. 2 (2014): 39–52.

11. Li, Sato, and Sicular, Rising Inequality in China. On how official policies actually aggravate rural-urbanincome inequality, see Martin K. Whyte, ed., One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Con-temporary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Whyte, “Soaring Income Gaps.”


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education, health care, and many basics have left many ordinary Chinese feelingpriced out and denied opportunities.12 In other words, much more is involved inChina’s income inequality trends than simply a statistical shift. The gaps betweenthe rich and the poor are not only much larger today but strikingly more visible,with a growing potential to incite envy and anger among those Chinese who arenot doing so well.

CHINA ’S DISTRIBUTIVE INJUSTICE SOCIALVOLCANO SCENARIO

In a New York Times article in 2006, Joseph Kahn stated, “Because many peoplebelieve that wealth flows from access to power more than it does from talent or

Figure 1. Comparative Gini Coefficient Trends (Gini X 100)

Sources: Estimates for China in 1988 and later come from the China Household Income Project

Surveys (Li, Sato, and Sicular, Rising Inequality in China); remaining data come from the UNU-

WIDER World Income Inequality Database (see n. 6).

12. However, it is not the case that China’s income gaps have been produced by the rich getting richerwhile the poor get poorer. Rather, China has made impressive progress in reducing the proportion of the pop-ulation living below internationally recognized levels of poverty, from perhaps 60 percent at the end of theMao erato under 10 percent in recent years (see Li, Sato, and Sicular, Rising Inequality in China). Instead, the trend can bedescribed as one in which most poor Chinese have experienced income gains during the reform era but moreslowly than their richer fellow citizens. The rising tide of economic development has lifted almost all boats but atvery different speeds. Even in urban China, pockets of extreme poverty persist; see, e.g., Mun Young Cho, TheSpecter of “the People”: Urban Poverty in Northeast China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).



risk-taking, the wealth gap has incited outrage and is viewed as at least partly re-sponsible for tens of thousands of mass protests around the country in recentyears.”13 Two years later, a Reuters dispatch quoted a Chinese researcher makinga similar claim: “Writing in the Chinese Economic Times on Thursday, ProfessorZhou [Tianyong, a researcher at the Central Party School] warned that the result-ing strains between rich and poor could erupt into searing unrest that would testthe ruling Communist Party’s grip.”14 More recently a BBC reporter commentedon the transition to the leadership of Xi Jinping in 2012: “So the job of makingChina a fairer place will now fall to the Communist Party’s next generation ofleaders, who will rule the country for the next 10 years. The fear is that China’sgrowing inequities could undermine the legitimacy of their one-party rule, andthe more unequal China becomes, the more unstable it may be.”15

What are the specific claims that together form the social volcano scenario? Inreviewing a large number of such statements, I include the following claims:

1. Most ordinary Chinese citizens view current income gaps as excessive and unfair.2. As the gaps between rich and poor have widened, ordinary Chinese have be-

come more and more angry.3. There is a growing popular belief that the benefits produced by China’s market

reforms are being monopolized by the undeserving wealthy and powerful.4. There is widespread nostalgia for the perceived greater equality of the lateMao era.5. Peasants, migrants, people living in interior provinces, and other disadvantaged

groups are even more angry than others about the growing gaps between richand poor.

6. Popular anger over income inequality is a major contributor to the growingwave of mass protests that could eventually threaten Party rule.

My own research for the past decade and more has been devoted to examiningwhether these social volcano prognoses are accurate or not. Based mainly on theresults of a 2004 China national survey on these issues, I concluded that such as-sertions cannot withstand empirical scrutiny. My refutation formed the core ofmy 2010 bookMyth of the Social Volcano.16 In general my colleagues and I foundthat there was surprisingly little sign of anger then about current patterns of in-come inequality in China and that in many respects Chinese survey respondentswere more accepting of those patterns and more optimistic about their personalchances of getting ahead than their counterparts in other countries. Furthermore,the disadvantaged (and rural residents in particular) unexpectedly had more pos-

13. Joseph Kahn, “China Makes Commitment to Social Harmony,” New York Times, October 12, 2006.14. Reuters, “China Scholar Warns of Social Turmoil as Growth Slows,” December 4, 2008, available at

http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/12/05/us-china-economy-unrest-idUSTRE4B40H820081205.15. Damian Grammaticas, “China’s Ever-Widening Wealth Gap,” BBC News, November 1, 2012.16. Martin K. Whyte, Myth of the Social Volcano (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).



itive attitudes toward current inequalities than their more advantaged fellow cit-izens (particularly relative to educated urbanites). While I labeled the Chinesevolcano a myth in the book, my subsequent research and the subsequent roundsof our surveys have led me to a reformulated question, namely, whether the so-cial volcano of anger about income inequality, even if dormant in 2004, mightperhaps no longer be so.

The 2004 survey onwhich the book was based could not speak to the question ofwhether popular anger about income inequality was on the increase or not (claims 2and 3 above). To address the question of change over time, this article presentsselected results from three national surveys I helped direct (in 2004, 2009, and2014).17 In order to place these China surveys into a comparative context, so wecan assess how relatively angry or complacent Chinese citizens are about currentinequalities (social volcano claims 1 and 4 above), the Chinese results will be com-pared with the findings of surveys in other societies (both postsocialist societies andadvanced capitalist ones) that asked the same questions. Since the central issue weare considering here is whether Chinese have become angry about the inequalitiesspawned by the post-Mao market reforms and their increasingly capitalistic soci-ety, and whether they feel that the socialist system they once lived under wasmorefair, the most appropriate comparison is with other postsocialist countries (inEastern Europe) as well as with advanced capitalist countries.

SURVEYS ON CHINA ’S INCOME INEQUALITYAND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

All three China surveys involved collaboration with, and survey field administra-tion by, the Research Center for Contemporary China at Peking University, di-rected by Shen Mingming.18 These surveys incorporated replications of a large

17. The first China national survey in 2004 was preceded by a pilot survey conducted in Beijing in 2000.The findings of the Beijing pilot survey, while broadly similar to the later national surveys, will not be discussedhere. My analysis here examines only overall patterns of inequality attitudes for the full sample in each Chinasurvey but not how those attitudes vary by social class, income, rural versus urban residence, or other back-ground factors. So social volcano claim 5 above will not be considered here, although I have examined itelsewhere. For the 2004 survey, internal variations in views on current inequalities are examined in detail inWhyte, Myth of the Social Volcano; for how those variations changed between 2004 and 2009, see Martin K.Whyte and Dong-Kyun Im, “Is the Social Volcano Still Dormant? Trends in Chinese Attitudes toward In-equality,” Social Science Research 48 (November 2014): 62–76.

18. A large but shifting team of colleagues assisted the author in the first two China national surveyprojects, including Jieming Chen, Juan Chen, Maocan Guo, Chunping Han, Pierre Landry, Xiaobo Lu, AlbertPark, and Wang Feng. Both the 2004 and 2009 surveys received primary support from the Smith RichardsonFoundation and various sources at Harvard University (the Harvard China Fund, the Weatherhead Center forInternational Affairs, the Asia Center, and the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies), with some additionalfunding coming from the University of California at Irvine and from Peking University. The lead investigatorsfor the 2014 survey were Kristin Dalen and Hedda Flatø, researchers at the Fafo Institute for Applied Inter-national Studies in Norway, with principal funding coming from Norwegian sources.


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number of questions about views on current inequalities that had previouslybeen employed in surveys in other countries, enabling us to compare the atti-tudes of Chinese citizens with their counterparts elsewhere. Particularly impor-tant in this regard were replications of questions used in the International SocialJustice Project (ISJP), which carried out several rounds of surveys in Eastern Eu-ropean countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and West Ger-many beginning in 1991.19

For the 2004 China national survey, we employed spatial probability sam-pling, a technique developed by project colleagues Pierre Landry and ShenMingming.20 Using this procedure, in 2004 a nationally representative sampleof 3,267 Chinese adults ages 18–70 were interviewed, with a response rate ofabout 75 percent. The 2009 survey was a follow-up to the 2004 survey, conductedto assess changes in popular attitudes over time and in reaction to the post-2008global financial crisis. The same sampling frame was used as in 2004, and we in-terviewed 2,967 respondents nationally, a response rate of about 70 percent. Thepassage of time required us to draw a new set of sampling points for the 2014survey, although following the same basic sample design. The new survey repeatedvirtually all of the same attitude questions regarding inequality and distributivejustice issues, making possible comparisons of Chinese attitudes at three separatepoints of time at five-year intervals. In the 2014 survey 2,507 respondents wereinterviewed, with a response rate of about 66 percent.

CHINESE ATTITUDES TOWARD INEQUALITY IN TEMPORALAND CROSS-NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

I present here tables that place the Chinese attitudes in comparative context.21

The responses from each Chinese survey are displayed in the first three columns

19. See, in particular, James Kluegel, David Mason, and Bernd Wegener, eds., Social Justice and PoliticalChange (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995); David Mason and James Kluegel, eds., Marketing Democracy:Changing Opinion about Inequality and Politics in East Central Europe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,2000). The ISJP focus on Eastern Europe includes Russia and several other parts of the former Soviet Union.Not all the countries included in the ISJP project are used in the comparative tables presented later in thisarticle. In all ISJP rounds, separate surveys were administered in the former West and East German portions ofGermany. Data reported here from the most recent rounds of the ISJP project (in 2005 and 2006) were kindlyshared through the assistance of Bernd Wegener.

20. For details on how this sampling method is carried out, see Pierre Landry and Shen Mingming,“Reaching Migrants in Survey Research: The Use of the Global Positioning System to Reduce Coverage Bias inChina,” Political Analysis 13, no. 1 (2005): 1–22. (Most China surveys continue to use household registrationrecords as the basis for drawing samples, but those records are increasingly inaccurate due to the ability ofChinese citizens to move away from where they are registered. Spatial probability sampling selects respondentsbased on their de facto residential locations, no matter where they are legally registered.)

21. Note that there are two social volcano claims addressed in this analysis—whether anger about the un-fairness of current income inequalities is rising in China, and whether such anger is already at levels as high as orhigher than in other societies. The tables that follow allow us to address both claims—first by comparing the threeChina surveys and then by comparing all of the China results with the other countries included in these tables.


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of each table.22 By comparing the first three percentages in each row of the tables,one can get a sense of how Chinese attitudes toward the statements in questionchanged over time. Since more than 70 attitude questions were included in oursurveys, only a selection of results is presented here.

The remaining cells in each row in these tables display comparable percent-ages from the surveys conducted in multiple ISJP countries. That project con-ducted several rounds of surveys—in a broad range of advanced capitalist andEast European postsocialist countries in 1991, in a smaller number of mostlyEast European countries in 1996, and then in a still smaller number of ISJP coun-tries in 2005 or 2006. The columns in the middle of each table summarize re-sponses in East European postsocialist countries, while the columns on the rightsummarize responses in advanced capitalist countries. These summaries forother countries are included to help assess whether Chinese anger about currentinequalities in any survey year is high or low when compared with other societies.For all of the ISJP locales, only the results of the most recent survey are dis-played.23

There are multiple dimensions involved in thinking about the fairness or un-fairness of current inequalities, and no single question or summary scale can rep-resent this complexity.24 Based on previous work analyzing distributive justiceattitudes, I distinguish three distinct conceptual domains here. The first involvesperceptions of current inequalities—the extent to which respondents think cur-rent income inequalities in their society are fair or unfair. A second domain con-cerns the optimism versus pessimism that respondents feel about opportunitiesfor upward social mobility and obtaining social justice. The third and final do-main concerns approval of income differentials versus preferences for greater

22. Since the 2004 and 2009 surveys sampled urban and rural locales separately, sampling weights were usedto adjust the raw percentages to accurately reflect the views of all Chinese adults. Since the 2009 survey involvedslightly different weights, the percentages for 2004 displayed in these tables, based on those revised weights,differ very slightly from those reported in earlier publications based on that survey alone. The 2014 Chinasurvey did not oversample urban localities, but sampling weights were nonetheless applied in order to make theresults of that survey fully comparable to the 2004 and 2009 surveys. All results reported here are weightedpercentages.

23. Germany gets two columns in each table, since, as noted earlier, ISJP has continued conducting separatesurveys in former West Germany and East Germany. The ISJP also conducted surveys in some additionalcountries, such as Holland and Estonia, which are not included in these tables. By displaying only the mostrecent figures from the ISJP surveys, we assume that average figures for a particular country generally reflectpersistent, dominant attitudes in each nation rather than highlight what was happening to the economy orother events and trends there in that particular survey year. Obviously this is something of simplificationnecessary to avoid drowning the reader in details, but we think it is a defensible assumption.

24. As noted earlier, each China survey included more than 70 questions regarding attitudes toward in-equality. Even after combining related questions into scales, we ended up with 12 distinct inequality attitudemeasures in analyzing the 2004 survey data, with statistical associations across these measures quite weak. Seethe discussion in Whyte, Myth of the Social Volcano, chaps. 5–9.



equality and for a stronger government role in promoting equality. Responses toquestions in each of these domains are displayed in sequence below, in tables 1, 2,and 3.

Perceptions of Current Inequalities

The first row in table 1 displays the results when survey respondents in each localewere asked, “Do you think the current income gaps among people in this countryare too large, somewhat large, appropriate, somewhat small, or too small?” Herethe percentages in each cell are a total of those who responded “too large” and“somewhat large.”Comparing the China results first, it is notable that the percent-age of respondents who feel that national income gaps are too large increasedfrom 71.9 percent in 2004 to 75 percent in 2009 and then to 81.5 percent in2014. However, it is also evident that substantial majorities in all of the countriessurveyed feel that their current national income gaps are too large. These Chineseresponses look fairlymoderate in comparative perspective—higher than in theUSsurvey, similar to or a bit higher than the levels in the British, West German, andJapanese surveys, but below the levels in all of the East European ISJP countries(except Poland in 1991). In sum, Chinese respondents join their counterpartsin many other societies in feeling that national income gaps are wider than theyshould be. Though Chinese are evenmore likely to feel this way in the most recentsurveys, they are not unusually critical of those gaps.

In judging how fair or unfair current income gaps are, much more is involvedthan simply assessing the size of the gap between rich and poor. Arguably moreimportant are views about who the rich are and how they obtained their wealthand who remains poor and why they are stuck in poverty. In the ISJP and Chinasurveys, a battery of questions was asked to assess what psychologists call suchattributions of poverty versus wealth. Each respondent was presented with a se-ries of possible explanations for why some people and not others are poor andalso with a series of possible explanations for why some people are rich. In eachcase they were asked to render judgments about whether a particular factor had avery large influence (on being poor, or on being rich), a large influence, some in-fluence, a small influence, or no influence at all. Among the factors they wereasked to rate, some were designed to stress individual merit (e.g., lack of effortexplaining poverty, talent explaining wealth) and some to reflect societal unfair-ness (e.g., unequal opportunity explaining poverty, unfairness of the economic sys-tem explaining wealth). The next seven rows in table 1 display examples of compar-ative survey responses based on this set of questions.

Row 2 in table 1 displays perceptions of the importance of lack of ability inexplaining who is currently poor. It is immediately obvious that on this questionthe responses in all three Chinese surveys are off the charts in comparison withany ISJP country, whether advanced capitalist or postsocialist. In all the China


Table1.

Perceptions

ofcurrentinequalities(%

)

EastEu

ropean

Postsocialist

AdvancedCapitalist

China

Russia

Bulgaria

Hun

gary

a

Czech

Republic

Eastern

Germany

Poland

United

States

Great

Britain

West

Germany

Japan

2004

2009

2014

1996

1996

2005

2006

2006

1991

1991

1991

2006

1991

1.Nationalincom

egaps

(som

ewhatlarge+

toolarge)

71.9

7581.5

86.3

95.6

94.9

84.8

88.6

69.7

65.2

7578.4

72.6

2.Po

vertyandlack

ofability

(large

+very

large)

60.7

64.7

63.6

2826.7

30.8

28.8

26.6

34.8

35.2

32.8

36.5

25.7

3.Po

vertyandloweffort(large

+very

large)

5464.7

62.1

39.1

35.6

28.5

45.3

3242.8

47.8

34.9

4462

4.Po

vertyandun

fairecon

omicstructure

(large

+very

large)

21.9

15.1

23.8

72.6

8863.2

44.6

71.9

65.2

44.9

48.1

44.6

36.2

5.Wealth

andability

(large

+very

large)

68.9

72.7

71.3

48.3

34.1

4254.5

51.8

4659.7

53.9

59.5

65.1

6.Wealth

andhard

work(large

+very

large)

61.3

67.4

68.3

38.1

48.9

26.5

53.5

5032

66.2

60.2

62.5

48.4

7.Wealth

anddishon

esty

(large

+very

large)

18.4

17.9

20.7

74.1

82.4

48.1

64.9

4362.4

42.9

35.5

33.3

27.8

8.Wealth

-unfairecon

omy(large

+very

large)

26.8

20.5

28.8

72.7

77.5

65.5

57.8

57.4

52.2

39.4

44.5

35.6

53

9.Eq

ualo

pportunitiesexist(agree

+strongly

agree)

37.8

37.9

36.9

22.8

7.1

11.9

31.2

20.3

25.5

65.9

41.8

31.8

38.1

Source:C

omparative

data

from

ISJP

surveys,variou

syears.

Note:Questionwording:

1.Doyouthinkthat

thecurrentincomegaps

amon

gpeop

lein

thiscoun

tryaretoolarge,somew

hatlarge,approp

riate,somew

hatsm

all,or

toosm

all?

2.In

your

opinion,to

whatd

egreedo

es[lackof

abilityor

competence]currently

causepeop

leto

becomepo

or:a

very

largedegree,a

largedegree,tosomedegree,a

smalldegree,or

isno

tat

allafactor

inthesepeop

le’spo

verty?

3.In

your

opinion,

towhatdegree

does

[lackof

individu

aleffort]currently

causepeop

leto

becomepo

or?

4.In

your

opinion,

towhatdegree

does

do[problem

sin

theecon

omicstructure]

currently

causepeop

leto

becomepo

or?

5.In

your

opinion,

towhatdegree

does

[possessingability

orcompetence]

currently

causepeop

leto

becomewealth

y?6.In

your

opinion,

towhatdegree

does

[working

hard]currently

causepeop

leto

becomewealth

y?7.In

your

opinion,

towhatdegree

does

[disho

nesty]

currently

causepeop

leto

becomewealth

y?8.In

your

opinion,

towhatdegree

does

[unfairnessin

theecon

omicstructure]

causepeop

leto

becomewealth

y?9.

Towhatextent

doyouagreewiththefollowingstatem

ent:Currently,theop

portun

itiesto

besuccessful

arethesameforallpeop

le?(stron

glyagree,

agree,

neutral,disagree,

strongly

disagree)

aFo

rHun

gary,the

figure

inrow1isfrom

the1996

survey.

All use
sub Thi
ject to U
s coniv
nteners

t doity o

wnf C

loadhica

ed go

fromPres

12s T

8.1erm

03.1s an

49.d C

052ond

on ition

Jas
nu (h
aryttp

0://w

5, 2w

01w.

6 1jou

0:rna

57:ls.

27uch

AMic
ago .ed u/ t-and-c).


surveys 61–65 percent feel that lack of ability plays a large role in explaining whysome people remain poor, with only small differences across the three surveys.(Unlike on the national income gap question in row 1, if anything, views in therecent China surveys are more positive than in 2004.) In all of the ISJP countriesonly 26–37 percent share this view.

Row 3 displays responses to a comparable question about the role of lack ofindividual effort in explaining poverty. Here the Chinese responses are not asstarkly different from other countries, but they tell much the same story. Withthe exception of Japan, none of the other countries rate lack of individual effortas so important in explaining poverty as do Chinese, and in Eastern Europe therankings are substantially lower (29–45 percent versus 54–65 percent for China),with advanced capitalist countries more variable (from 35 percent to 62 percent).Once again the trend over time is for respondents in the more recent China sur-veys to rate lack of individual effort as even more important in explaining pov-erty than their 2004 counterparts. In sharp contrast, in row 4 only 15–24 percentof Chinese rate unfairness of the economic system as important in explaining whois poor, compared with 36–48 percent in advanced capitalist countries and 45–88 percent in East European postsocialist countries.

We now move on to explanations of why some people are rich. Row 5 displaysresponses to the perceived importance of talent and ability in explaining who isrich. The Chinese responses in all surveys give substantially greater emphasis tothis merit factor (69–73 percent) than in any other country, with East Europeanpostsocialist countries stressing it the least (only 34–55 percent). Similarly, Chi-nese respondents believe in the role of hard work in explaining who is currentlywealthy (61–68 percent, see row 6), with East European postsocialist countriesemphasizing this factor much less (only 27–54 percent).

Row 7 displays responses to a question about the perceived role of dishonestyin explaining who is rich. The Chinese responses here are almost unbelievably low(only 18–21 percent stress this factor), much lower than advanced capitalist coun-tries (28–43 percent), which are in turnmuch lower than East European countries(43–82 percent).25 On this question the responses in all three Chinese surveys arequite uniform, with only a slightly stronger emphasis in 2014 than in the earliersurveys. Similarly, in row 8, when asked about unfairness of the current economic

25. That Chinese respondents place such low emphasis on dishonesty as a route to wealth was a surprise,particularly in view of the widespread public discussion in recent years about the seriousness of corruption. Acouple of considerations put these responses in context. First, in any society when people answer questions suchas these, they are most likely thinking of rich and poor people in their immediate social environment, not aboutdistant and largely unknown new millionaires or not very visible rich relatives of high officials. Also, thequestion in row 7, replicated from ISJP, asks about dishonesty (buchengshi), but not specifically about cor-ruption ( fubai), as a source of wealth. If the question asked specifically about corruption as a source of wealth,most likely Chinese respondents would have emphasized this factor more.



structure as a factor explaining who is wealthy, in all of the China surveys respon-dents stressed this factor much less than in any other country (21–29 percent).Although this response is higher in the 2014 Chinese survey than earlier, it re-mains much lower than in any of the ISJP countries.

Finally, row 9 displays responses to a statement that currently the opportuni-ties to be successful are the same for everyone in society. Here the American re-spondents in 1991 are off the charts, with almost 66 percent agreeing that equalopportunities exist for all. The figures for China, where 37–38 percent agree in eachsurvey, are roughly comparable to the figures for the advanced capitalist countriesother than the United States (32–42 percent), and substantially higher than in anyof the East European countries (7–31 percent).

To summarize the comparisons in table 1, in almost all cases Chinese citizensperceived current inequalities substantially less critically than their counterpartsin postsocialist Eastern Europe. While for some questions Chinese perceptionswere similar to the advanced capitalist countries, for others they were substan-tially more favorable. In general Chinese are more likely to perceive current in-equalities as based on merit, and therefore as fair, than their counterparts else-where. Regarding changes over time in Chinese attitudes, on only one question(views on national income gaps, in row 1) is there any indication of Chinese at-titudes becoming steadilymore critical over time. In the other rows the differencesacross the three China surveys are relatively small, although on balance there areslight tendencies for the 2009 respondents to be least critical of current inequal-ities, and for the 2004 and 2014 respondents to be slightly more critical. Clearlythere is no support here for the view that China’s distributive injustice social vol-cano is heading toward an eruption.

Optimism versus Pessimism about Upward Mobility and Social Justice

The second domain of distributive justice attitudes concerns optimism versuspessimism about the opportunities for ordinary people to improve their standardof living and obtain social justice. Row 1 in table 2 displays responses to a ques-tion about what respondents predict their family’s economic situation will be fiveyears later, with each cell displaying the sum of those responding “much better”and “a little better.” Unfortunately this question was not asked in several of theISJP country surveys or in any of the advanced capitalist ones. Nevertheless, theexuberant optimism in all the China surveys on this question (with 62–76 per-cent expecting improvement), compared with the much more pessimistic viewsin the available East European surveys (only 21–22 percent optimistic), is quitestriking. And on this question the 2009 respondents express even more optimismthan their 2004 counterparts, and the 2014 respondents still more.

The next two questions ask respondents to predict whether the percentageof people in their society who are poor, and who are rich, will increase, remain


Table2.

Optim

ism

versus

pessim

ism

(%)

EastEu

ropean

Postsocialist

AdvancedCapitalist

China

Russia

Bulgaria

Hun

gary

a

Czech

Republic

Eastern

Germanyb

Poland

United

States

Great

Britain

West

Germany

Japan

2004

2009

2014

1996

1996

2005

2006

2006

1991

1991

1991

2006

1991

1.Family

incomein

5years

(better+muchbetter)

61.7

72.9

76.3

2220.5

21.1

...

22.3

...

...

...

...

...

2.Percentage

poor

in5years

(increase)

26.7

13.1

17.9

47.9

75.1

77.4

...

79.6

74.5

6958

43.1

37.2

3.Percentage

rich

in5years

(increase)

60.2

61.9

59.7

41.5

32.4

42.3

...

45.1

57.9

29.1

34.5

46.3

36.7

4.Hardworkalwaysrewarded

(agree

+stronglyagree)

6165.5

58.4

10.7

2.8

25.9

22.7

34.7

8.5

37.4

18.7

4716.6

5.Nosensein

talkingof

justice

(agree

+stronglyagree)

34.9

36.8

40.4

45.5

50.1

43.3

41.2

52.7

49.2

27.6

34.4

46.1

28.6

6.Can’ttelljusticemeaning

(agree

+stronglyagree)

38.9

35.1

43.3

54.4

62.7

64.8

59.9

65.2

64.1

58.8

61.9

52.3

62.9

7.Officialsdon’tcare

(agree

+

stronglyagree)

50.2

45.2

52.5

69.7

76.3

58.8

7076.6

72.3

6466.5

65.9

74.7

Source:C

omparative

data

from

ISJP

surveys,variou

syears.


1.Five

yearsfrom

now,d

oyouestimatethat

your

family

econ

omicsituationwill

bemuchbetter,a

little

better,n

ochange,a

little

worse,o

rmuchworse?

2.In

thenextfive

years,do

youthinkthepercentage

ofpo

orpeop

le[tho

sewho

cann

otsupp

ortb

asiclivingcond

itions

likefood

,clothingandho

using]

inou

rcoun

trywillincrease,decrease,

orstay

thesame?

3.In

thenext

five

years,do

youthinkthepercentage

ofwealth

ypeop

le[tho

sewho

canpretty

muchbu

yanything

forthem

selves]in

ourcoun

trywill

increase,d

ecrease,or

stay

thesame?

4.In

ourcoun

try,hard

workwill

alwaysbe

rewarded.

(stron

glyagree,agree,neutral,disagree,stron

glydisagree)

5.Sinceweareun

ableto

change

thestatus

quo,

discussing

socialjusticeismeaningless.(samerespon

secategories)

6.Lo

okingat

things

asthey

areno

w,itisvery

difficultto

clarify

whatisjustandwhatisun

just.(samerespon

secategories)

7.Governm

entofficialsdo

n’tcare

whatcommon

peop

lelikemethink.

(sam

erespon

secategories)

aFo

rHun

gary

figuresin

rows1,2,3,and7arefrom

the1996

survey.

bFo

rEastern

Germanythefigure

inrow1isfrom

the1996

survey.



about the same, or decrease in the next five years. Only a minority of respondentsin each Chinese survey expect the proportion who are poor to increase, with thefigure in the 2009 survey strikingly low, only 13 percent, and only slightly higherin 2014. In contrast, a large majority in most East European countries expects theproportion of people who are poor to increase, and respondents in both the UnitedStates and in Great Britain were also quite pessimistic. (West Germans and Japa-nese were less pessimistic but still markedly more so than their Chinese counter-parts.)

On the flip side, row 3 displays responses about the expected proportion ofrich people. Here the contrast with the Chinese figures is not quite so striking,but nonetheless in all three Chinese surveys higher percentages expect the pro-portion who are rich to increase (60–62 percent) than in any of the ISJP surveys.The percentage of Chinese who express agreement with the (dubious) social mo-bility statement that “hard work is always rewarded” is displayed in row 4. Chi-nese were again more likely to agree (61 percent in 2004, 66 percent in 2009, and58 percent in 2014) than in any of the other countries. West Germans, Ameri-cans, and East Germans fall far behind Chinese levels of agreement that hardwork is always rewarded, and most other East European countries show strongdisagreement (only 3 percent of Bulgarians and 9 percent of Poles agree).

The next three questions ask for reactions to pessimistic statements about so-cial justice. Row 5 displays the sum of those who agree or strongly agree with thestatement that it doesn’t make sense to talk about social justice because you can’tchange things anyway. The percentages of Chinese agreeing with this fatalisticstatement (35–40 percent) are modestly lower than the figures in all of the EastEuropean surveys (41–53 percent), but they are in the middle range in compar-ison with advanced capitalist countries. On this question the levels of Chinesefatalism increase from survey to survey, but only modestly. Next, when askedwhether under current conditions it is hard to say anymore what is just and whatis unjust (row 6), Chinese are substantially less likely to express agreement thantheir counterparts in any of the ISJP countries. While Chinese responded morepessimistically in 2014 than earlier, they were still below the levels of pessimismin the other countries.

Finally, row 7 displays levels of agreement with the general statement “govern-ment officials do not care what common people like me think.” Here about halfthe Chinese in all three surveys agree with this statement (45–53 percent), butthey are still markedly less likely to do so than their counterparts elsewhere. Onceagain the most pessimistic views were expressed by East Europeans, althoughJapanese respondents also had surprisingly jaundiced views. These Chinese re-sponses are particularly surprising because in all of the other countries displayedhere, citizens have regular opportunities to express their displeasure with govern-ment officials through the ballot box via direct elections, a mechanism availableto Chinese only at the rural village level.



A summary of the results for the attitude domain of optimism versus pessi-mism about opportunities and social justice (table 2) is similar to the previousdomain of perceptions of the fairness versus unfairness of current inequalities.In all of these comparisons Chinese respondents express views that are eitherfairly similar to, or more optimistic than, their counterparts in the ISJP surveys.Comparing Chinese attitudes across time, except for the question about expectedfamily income five years from now (row 1), respondents in 2014 had slightlymore negative attitudes than their counterparts in 2004 and 2009, but these dif-ferences are modest. Again we find no sign here that Chinese anger over blockedopportunities and injustice is particularly high or systematically on the increase,contrary to social volcano scenario claims.

Preferences for Greater Equality versus Approval of Income Differentials

The third and final inequality attitude domain involves whether respondentswould prefer greater social equality and a more active role by the governmentin promoting equality, versus whether they approve of, and recognize the posi-tive incentive effects of, prevailing income differentials. When asked whether dis-tributing wealth and income equally to all is the fairest approach (in row 1 of ta-ble 3), there is relatively strongChinese support, with around a third of respondentsin each survey expressing agreement. This was higher than in any of the ISJP coun-try surveys with the curious exception of Japan in 1991, where almost 38 percentagree. So despite the fact that Chinese have more positive views than their counter-parts elsewhere about current income gaps (tables 1 and 2), they also express rela-tively strong support for total equality of distribution, although slightly less so in2014 than in 2009.

When asked whether the government should guarantee a minimum standardof living for everyone (row 2), Chinese support is much higher, and this supportincreased across surveys, from 81 percent in 2004 to 89 percent in 2014. On thisquestion the United States is the outlier, with only 56 percent of Americans ap-proving of a government minimum income guarantee. The much higher levels ofsupport compared with the United States expressed by Chinese is not, however,all that unusual in a broader comparison. In the other ISJP surveys, support forminimum income guarantees ranged from 76 percent to 93 percent, placing Chi-nese responses roughly in the middle of the pack.

However, when presented with the statement “in order to meet everyone’sneeds, there should be redistribution from the rich to the poor” (row 3), Chineserespondents in all three surveys are relatively unenthusiastic, with the least sup-port for income distribution expressed in the most recent Chinese survey (25 per-cent, down slightly from 27 percent in 2009 and 30 percent in 2004). Responses inthe ISJP countries are quite variable, with Germans east and west along with Hun-garians strongly supportive of income redistribution (67–80 percent) but Czechs


Table3.

Favorequalityor

differentials(%

)

EastEu

ropean

Postsocialist

AdvancedCapitalist

China

Russia

Bulgaria

Hun

gary

Czech

Republic

Eastern

Germany

Poland

United

States

Great

Britain

West

Germany

Japan

2004

2009

2014

1996

1996

2005

2006

2006

1991

1991

1991

2006

1991

1.Fairest-equald

istribution

(agree

+stronglyagree)

29.3

35.9

32.5

28.6

32.4

22.5

1330.9

19.1

19.2

28.9

22.3

37.5

2.Govtminim

umincomefloor

(agree

+stronglyagree)

80.6

85.8

88.7

90.8

92.5

90.9

77.5

86.4

85.3

55.9

82.1

76.2

80.6

3.Fair-redistributeto

meetneeds

(agree

+stronglyagree)

29.9

27.4

24.9

44.9

36.8

67.2

34.2

79.6

50.9

4546.7

69.3

30

4.Governm

entlim

ittopincome

(agree

+stronglyagree)

33.9

31.1

32.7

39.5

43.7

60.9

22.6

59.1

44.3

16.7

37.9

4033.4

5.Businessprofi

tsbenefitall

(agree

+stronglyagree)

38.7

27.4

15.3

39.2

13.1

17.7

34.5

32.3

49.5

51.1

4238.9

51.3

6.Incomegapfostershard

work

(agree

+stronglyagree)

50.6

46.1

38.4

41.7

39.3

20.2

42.9

52.3

65.5

61.3

62.7

58.4

48.5

7.Fair-keepwhatyouearn

(agree

+stronglyagree)

62.8

69.5

72.3

80.1

68.1

54.9

75.8

85.9

63.8

92.9

81.2

84.7

65.9

8.Fair-richkids

better

education

(agree

+stronglyagree)

64.6

58.3

5960

60.1

30.3

35.1

37.4

67.9

65.2

56.3

42.8

50.9

Source:C

omparative

data

from

ISJP

surveys,variou

syears.


1.Distributingwealth

andincomeequally

amon

gpeop

leisthemostjustmetho

d.(stron

glyagree,agree,neutral,disagree,stron

glydisagree)

2.The

governmentshou

ldassure

that

everyperson

isat

leastableto

maintainaminim

umstandard

ofliving.(sam

erespon

secategories)

3.In

orderto

satisfyeveryone’sneeds,even

ifyoumusttake

from

therich

toassistthepo

or,itshou

ldbe

done.(samerespon

secategories)

4.The

governmentshou

ldregulate

thehighestlevelo

fincomeforan

individu

al.(samerespon

secategories)

5.Towhatextent

doyouagreewiththefollowingstatem

ent:Ifbu

sinesspeop

lemakeprofi

ts,intheendeveryone

insocietybenefits.(samerespon

secategories)

6.Onlywhenincomedifferencesarelargeenou

ghwill

individu

alshave

theincentiveto

workhard.(samerespon

secategories)

7.Peoplehave

therightto

keep

whatthey

have

earned,eveniftheresultisgaps

betweenrich

andpo

orin

society.(sam

erespon

secategories)

8.Itisfairthat

thosewho

areableto

payforitcanobtain

better

educationalop

portun

itiesfortheirchild

ren.

(sam

erespon

secategories)



and Japanese almost as unenthusiastic (30–34 percent) as their Chinese counter-parts. Both Chinese and Japanese responses to the questions in rows 1 and 3 seemparadoxical, with relatively strong support for equal distribution but weak sup-port for redistribution in order to achieve that goal.

The negative Chinese view of official efforts to penalize the rich is confirmedby responses to whether a maximum income limit should be placed on all in-dividuals (row 4). Here Chinese again show a fairly low level of support (31–34 percent). Among ISJP countries the United States is again the outlier, withonly 17 percent approving of income limits. The other countries display as muchor greater approval of income limits as do the Chinese, with the greatest support inEastern Europe (except for the Czech Republic, where only 23 percent approve).

We now shift to questions involving approval of income gaps and material in-centives. Row 5 displays responses to the Adam Smithian statement that it is allright for businesspeople to make profits, because in the end everyone in societybenefits. Chinese responses show a change over time toward substantially morenegative responses—from 39 percent of Chinese surveyed in 2004 agreeing withthis statement to only 15 percent in 2014.26 Support for this view is generallystronger in the advanced capitalist countries (39–51 percent) and somewhatweaker in Eastern Europe (except for Russia and Poland), with Bulgarians (13 per-cent) and Hungarians (18 percent) about as unlikely as Chinese in 2014 to agreethat everyone benefits when businesspeople make profits.

Another question asked for reactions to the statement that only when incomedifferences are large enough will individuals have the incentive to work hard(row 6). This view is in line with the “functionalist” argument conveyed earlyin the reform era by Deng Xiaoping’s famous statement that “some people in ru-ral areas and cities should be allowed to get rich before others” (because envy ofthe newly rich will provide incentives for others). The Chinese surveys show de-clining support for this view, from 51 percent in 2004 to 46 percent in 2009 andonly 38 percent in 2014. These Chinese responses are toward the low end com-pared with ISJP surveys—higher than for Hungary (only 20 percent), but in thesame range as Bulgaria, Russia, and the Czech Republic, and less approving ofincome differentials than respondents in the advanced capitalist countries (aswell as East Germany and Poland).

At the same time, however, most Chinese feel it is fair for people to keep whatthey have earned, even if this results in a gap between rich and poor (row 7).Agreement with this view has increased across time in the Chinese surveys, from

26. In the 2000 pilot survey in Beijing that preceded our first national survey, 64 percent of respondentsagreed that businesspeople making profits was beneficial to society, perhaps indicating an even more dramaticdecline in support for this view over a longer period.



63 percent in 2004 to 72 percent in 2014.27 However, this is still lower than ap-proval of keeping what you earn in several of the ISJP countries, both post-socialist and capitalist. Finally, row 8 displays responses to a statement that itis fair for rich families to obtain better schooling for their children. On this ques-tion we see a modest decline in Chinese levels of agreement over time (from65 percent in 2004 to 58–59 percent in the two later surveys). Compared withISJP countries, however, this is still moderately high agreement, a bit below thelevels in the Polish (68 percent) and US surveys (65 percent), similar to Russiaand Bulgaria (both 60 percent), but substantially higher than in Hungary, theCzech Republic, and East Germany, as well as in West Germany and Japan.

How can we make sense of the variety of patterns in table 3? Chinese respon-dents obviously have disparate views on these questions rather than a simplepreference either for equality or for income differentials. They favor equality pur-sued via leveling up of the poor rather than leveling down of the rich.28 Chinesealso appear to believe that allowing people to keep their wealth is a simple matterof fairness, rather than being justified because this will promote incentives forothers, economic productivity, and societal prosperity.

Summing Up: Trends in Chinese Attitudes vis-à-vis Distributive Injustice

Taken together, the trends in Chinese responses between 2004 and 2014 shownin table 3 convey a different message than tables 1 and 2. Those earlier tables in-dicate that Chinese hold unusually accepting and even on some questions in-creasingly positive views about the fairness of the current structure of incomeinequalities and about the opportunities for ordinary citizens to pursue prosper-ity and obtain just treatment within that structure. In other words, there is littleindication in those two attitude domains of rising dissatisfaction with the statusquo, despite the fact that income inequalities in China have continued to increase.

However, a different message is conveyed by the responses in table 3: that Chi-nese citizens would like to see greater equality pursued through more measuresto assist their poor and disadvantaged fellow citizens and that they are also skep-tical of claims that current income gaps are necessary or desirable. In some re-spects these critical sentiments strengthened between 2004 and 2014. So in termsof preferences for equality versus inequality, the results in table 3 reveal some ris-

27. The trends in Chinese responses shown in table 3, rows 5 and 7, appear contradictory. The view thatbusiness profits play a positive role in society has been increasingly rejected, while views on individuals keepingwhat they earn have become more positive. Perhaps these contrary trends suggest that more Chinese re-spondents in recent years feel that many businesspeople have not earned the profits they are making.

28. During the Cultural Revolution Mao Zedong mainly promoted equality by leveling down, with practicesthat violated normal views on equitable distribution. See the discussion in Whyte, Myth of the Social Volcano.



ing dissatisfaction with the status quo.29 But this rising dissatisfaction with cur-rent income inequalities mainly involves concern about those Chinese citizenswho remain impoverished, rather than resentment against the rising and lavishlydisplayed wealth of the nouveau riche (although businesspeople have lost somefavor). Even in this one domain of rising dissatisfaction, then, we see no evidenceof a distributive injustice social volcano that is heading toward an eruption.

WHY HAS THE DISTRIBUTIVE INJUSTICE SOCIALVOLCANO REMAINED DORMANT?

In view of the sharp rise in the gap between rich and poor, why does the averageChinese continue to hold such approving views on the fairness of current in-equalities? Two trends are likely responsible for this acquiescence with rising in-come gaps: substantial trickling down of the benefits of China’s robust and sus-tained economic growth, as well as the positive impressions created by the“growth with equity” and “harmonious society” government initiatives and rhet-oric of recent years.

Taking the first factor first, it is important to stress the broad improvements intheir lives that the overwhelming majority of Chinese citizens have experiencedduring the reform era. Critics sometimes talk of the “bottom billion” of Chinesewho are being left out as a minority get rich,30 but most of our respondents donot agree. The optimism about future improvements in their family incomes dis-played in table 2 (row 1) is rooted in their own recent experiences, as well as inwhat they see happening to their neighbors and friends.

Table 4 presents available indicators of trends in personal well-being acrossour China surveys. In 2004 63 percent of respondents reported that their family’seconomic situation had improved compared with five years earlier, with this fig-ure rising to 79 percent in 2014 (row 1). Other indicators in the table show thatrespondents in the most recent survey were doing at least as well as, and in manycases significantly better than, those we interviewed in 2009, who were in turndoing better than their 2004 counterparts. For example, we see in these figuressteady gains in ownership of refrigerators, computers (as well as access to the In-ternet), and automobiles, as well as modest increases in satisfaction with their liv-ing standard and even ratings of their physical health.

So despite publicly aired criticisms about corruption and the ill-gotten gains ofthe very rich, most Chinese feel they have continued to benefit by working withincurrent structures of inequality, and for the most part they expect to be able to

29. For more details on this point, based on just the 2004 and 2009 surveys, see Whyte and Im, “Is the SocialVolcano Still Dormant?”

30. See, e.g., John Lee, “As China Gets Richer, Its People Get Poorer,” New Straits Times (Singapore), Oc-tober 6, 2009.



T

F

S

R

C

C

O

H

U

continue to do so in the future. In other words, it is not simply Party propagandaand censorship of critical ideas that promote acceptance of current inequalities asrelatively fair but the personal experiences of average Chinese families.

The work of Albert Hirschman on the tolerance of ordinary people around theworld toward inequality in the course of economic development helps explainthese results. Hirschman used the analogy of a “tunnel effect” to characterize thesituation: if two lanes of cars are stuck in a tunnel and only one lane starts to move,do drivers in the lane that is still stuck get angry or feel hopeful? Hirschman ar-gues that at least initially, they will feel hopeful that the good fortune of driversin the other lane is a sign that their own lane will soon start to move. He alsonotes, however, that if this situation continues too long, the hope of the stuck driv-ers may turn to intense anger.31 By the evidence of our surveys, in 2004, 2009, andstill in 2014, the buoyant growth of the Chinese economy and the resulting steadyimprovements in family living standards were still inspiring hopefulness aboutthe future despite the rising gaps between rich and poor.32

able 4. Material condition of Chinese (%)

31. Albert Hirschman, “The Changing Tolerance for Inequality in the CoWorld Development 1, no. 12 (1973): 29–36.

32. Also supportive of the idea of the continued operation of a tunnel effecwe added in 2009 about how respondents perceived people who lived arounwith five years earlier. An astounding 82.3 percent responded that their neighor much better, and in 2014 this figure increased further to 85.1 percent. Anceptance of current income gaps is China’s historical tradition. For centuriesnalistic rulers presiding over a very unequal society, but one that was also ch

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amily living standard compared with 5 years earlier (better)
63 75.4 79.1
atisfaction with current living standard (positive satisfaction)
31.8 40.5 43.6
ating of own physical health (fairly good or very good)
56.7 61.1 63.5
overed by public medical insurance? (yes)
24.7 85.3 93.6
overed by public old age insurance, pension? (yes)
20 25.9 48.5
wn current residence? (yes)
81.9 84.1 84
ousehold possessions (percentage that owns):

Color TV
79.5 95.6 97.2
Refrigerator
37.4 53.9 88.1
Motorcycle or scooter
35.3 51.2 50.8
Computer
13.8 27.3 59.1
Automobile
5.1 8.4 28.7
se the Internet? (at least some)
26.9 35.8 51
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The most dramatic improvement displayed in table 4 is the sharp rise in cov-erage by public medical insurance, from only 25 percent in 2004 to 85 percent in2009 and then 94 percent in 2014. This impressive progress points to the secondproposed explanation for Chinese acquiescence with widening income gaps—state policies designed to reduce inequality. This dramatic rise is the result of ahigh-priority government-led effort to rapidly spread a very modest level of med-ical insurance coverage in order to avoid the financial devastation earlier expe-rienced by many poor families who could not afford needed medical care. Theexpansion of medical insurance coverage is only one of several “harmonioussociety” official policies that were implemented and widely publicized duringthe period covered by our first two surveys, with efforts continuing after 2012(without using that slogan) under Xi Jinping. Those programs also included awaiving of tuition fees for the first nine grades of education, eliminating the graintax, offering minimum livelihood assistance payments to urban and then to ruralfamilies, and targeted efforts to improve livelihoods in designated impoverishedrural counties.33 While not quite as dramatic, the sharp rise in public old age in-surance coverage, from only 20 percent in 2004 to 49 percent in 2014 (row 5) isalso impressive. Given trends such as these, even families who did not benefitmuch from these policies are still likely aware of these state-directed social equityefforts. They may well be persuaded that China’s leaders are genuinely concernedabout improving the lives of the nation’s poor and disadvantaged citizens.

My contention, then, is that the combination of robust economic growth and awide range of highly publicized policies aimed at helping the poor has acted tokeep the distributive injustice social volcano dormant. If this contention is cor-rect, then ensuring that this threat to political stability remains dormant in thefuture will depend on sustaining an acceptable level of economic growth thatprovides broad benefits to ordinary Chinese, as well as on the leaders’ ability tocontinue to adopt measures that convey that they care about the lives of the dis-advantaged. China’s leaders have an impressive track record so far of using theirconsiderable financial, bureaucratic, and communication resources to make surethat the distributive injustice social volcano remains dormant. Even with thesomewhat slower economic growth rates expected in the future, it seems likelythat the Party can continue to prevent the distributive injustice social volcanofrom erupting.

mobility. Arguably, China has returned to a similar and thus familiar social order after the unusual detourthrough Mao’s socialist system, which involved less inequality but also less mobility, after the 1950s. See mydiscussion in Martin K. Whyte, “Sub-optimal Institutions but Superior Growth: The Puzzle of China’s Eco-nomic Boom,” in China’s Economic Dynamics: A Beijing Consensus in the Making?, ed. Jun Li and LimingWang(London: Routledge, 2014), 31–33.

33. For a more systematic analysis of a wide variety of harmonious society programs, see Li, Sato, andSicular, Rising Inequality in China.



CHINA ’S ACTIVE SOCIAL VOLCANO

The fact that the average Chinese citizen accepts the large and growing gap be-tween rich and poor has not translated into a satisfied and quiescent society.There has been rising social turbulence that can be mainly attributed to angerdirected at another injustice target—at inequalities in power rather than in in-come. What is the evidence that China faces a more active social volcano fueledby power gaps and resulting procedural injustices?

Unfortunately, I am unable to provide the same kind of systematic survey ev-idence on levels and trends in popular anger about abuses of power, official cor-ruption, lack of redress for mistreatment, and other forms of political injustice,and for a very simple reason. Investigating injustices stemming from power in-equalities via surveys as systematically as we have examined distributive injusticeissues remains off limits politically. We were not able to include more than a fewquestions related to procedural injustices (to be reviewed below) in our surveys,and that situation is unlikely to change. Indeed, most observers agree that theParty has become even more sensitive about criticisms of abuses of power sinceXi Jinping assumed power in 2012, with tightened controls over informationabout protest activities and increased harassment and arrests of activists and law-yers who try to publicize official abuses.34

In making my claim about injustices stemming from power inequalities beinga more serious threat to Party rule than distributive injustices, I am primarily re-lying on journalistic accounts and research reports on a wide variety of protestsin recent years that involve very diverse groups (peasants, migrant laborers, fac-tory workers, urban homeowners, pensioners, religious believers, ethnic minor-ities, etc.) and specific issues (e.g., agricultural land seizures; environmentalthreats and disasters; urban housing demolition; oppressive treatment of labor;coercive enforcement of family planning; destruction of places of worship; failureto protect the public from food contamination, environmental pollution, andother hazards; etc.).35 Even though systematic survey research on these issuesis not feasible, a considerable amount of information has now accumulated—through field observations, in-depth interviewing, and other methods—aboutthe mass protests that have erupted in recent years.

34. See Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows GovernmentCriticism but Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 2 (2013): 326–43.

35. See, e.g., Chung, Lai, and Xia, “Mounting Challenges to Governance in China”; Thomas Lum, SocialUnrest in China (Washington, DC: US Congressional Research Service, 2006); Kevin O’Brien and Lianjiang Li,Rightful Resistance in China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Ching Kwan Lee, Against theLaw: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); YongshunCai, Collective Resistance in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Eli Friedman, The Insur-gency Trap: Labor Politics in Post-socialist China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).


http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showLinks?crossref=10.1017%2FS0003055413000014


When viewing this evidence about China’s active social volcano, one is struckby the fact that almost nowhere in these protests are there indications of angerdirected at the very rich. Instead, the targets of popular anger are generally au-thority figures—sometimes employers and managers of polluting factories ormakers and sellers of adulterated food products but even more often political au-thorities. Usually these are local political leaders, with protestors not infrequentlyappealing to higher-level officials or even the top leadership in Beijing to inter-vene and correct injustices. Nevertheless, China’s leaders are clearly very worriedthat such local protests could escalate and, if not handled promptly and effectively,erupt into political protests directed at higher levels and the entire system. The Chi-nese leadership is aware that this is precisely what happened in Eastern Europeand the former Soviet Union in 1989–91, as well as in the more recent Color Rev-olutions and the Arab Spring.

Even though we could not systematically explore procedural injustices in ourChina surveys, we were able to include a few questions that provide some insightinto how average citizens feel about power vis-à-vis income inequalities. Table 5contains available comparisons that deal with feelings of fairness or unfairnessregarding two contrasting features of contemporary China: the wealth differencesthat have resulted from market reforms versus institutionalized inequalities stem-ming from China’s socialist political system. The latter involves two differenttypes of institutional features: (a) the categorical discrimination experienced bythose who hold a rural or agricultural household registration (hukou) as againstthose who have an urban household registration, and (b) the special treatment re-ceived by people in positions of power. In other words, the questions displayed intable 5 concern advantages enjoyed by some Chinese (and the disadvantages ex-

Table 5. Attitudes toward income versus power inequalities (%)

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1. Fair-rich obtain better schooling for kids (agree + strongly agree)
64.6 58.3 59
2. Fair-rich obtain better housing (agree + strongly agree)
58.8 53.8 46.8
3. Fair-rich obtain better medical care (agree + strongly agree)
47.6 38.7 35.7
4. Fair-urban hukou have more opportunities (agree + strongly agree)
25.3 20.6 18.4
5. Fair-rural migrants unable to get urban hukou (agree + strongly agree)
14.9 11.4 9.9
6. Fair-migrants unable to get urban benefits (agree + strongly agree)
9.3 8.6 8
7. Fair-those in power receive special treatment (agree + strongly agree)
21.9 16.2 13
8. Inequalities exist to benefit rich and powerful (agree + strongly agree)
51.2 43.3 48.6
9. Unfair treatment by local officials in last 3 years (agree + strongly agree)
26.7 10.4 12.9
10. Officials don’t care what ordinary people think (agree + strongly agree)
50.2 45.2 52.5
.edu/t-and-c).


perienced by others) as a result of market competition versus the advantagesreaped through bureaucratic power and preferences.

The first three rows display responses to whether it is fair for rich people to usetheir financial resources to obtain better schooling for their children (a repetitionof row 8 in table 3), better housing than others, and better medical care. Two pat-terns are visible in these responses. First, a majority or near majority in all threesurveys agree or strongly agree that it is fair for rich families to obtain betterschooling for their children and better housing than others, but the approval levelis lower regarding access to medical care (although a substantial minority agree).Second, on all three questions there is a clear drop in approval levels between 2004and 2009, and on housing and medical care this decline continues through 2014.Evidently support for the idea that rich people are entitled to use their incomes toobtain better access to basic public goods has weakened somewhat over time.

In urban China today one’s access to opportunities and services is affected notonly by income but also by where you were born and by the resulting distinctionbetween having a rural (agricultural) or urban (nonagricultural) household reg-istration. Urban migrants are systematically discriminated against in multipleways, no matter how long they have lived and worked in a city, although in recentyears the Party has pledged to eventually eliminate this bias.36 This bureaucrat-ically determined barrier is a legacy of the socialist institutions of the Mao era,and granting or denying opportunities based on the location of one’s birthand the registrations of one’s parents rather than on one’s own abilities and per-formance obviously conflicts fundamentally with the declared principles of Chi-na’s market reforms.

In any case, rows 4–6 in table 5 display responses on whether it is fair for urbanhukou holders to have more opportunities than people with rural registrations;whether it is fair for rural migrants to be unable to obtain urban registrations;and whether it is fair for rural migrants to be denied access to urban welfare ben-efits. On these questions again there are two clear patterns visible. First, only rel-atively small minorities in each survey (8–25 percent) agree or strongly agree thatsuch discrimination against migrants is fair, substantially fewer than approve ofrich families using their wealth to obtain advantages. Second, there is less sup-port in 2009 for discrimination against migrants than in 2004, and even less soby 2014. Obviously the figures from rows 1–3 and 4–6 are not exactly comparable,since they are asking about different kinds of advantages and disadvantages.Nonetheless, this comparison suggests that there is a much stronger sense of un-fairness surrounding discrimination based on one’s hukou, a holdover from Chi-

36. Recently official statements proclaim that the distinction between agricultural and nonagriculturalhukou should no longer be used to discriminate, but the continuing distinction between those with a localhukou and outsiders perpetuates systematic discrimination against de facto urban residents with rural origins.



na’s socialist bureaucratic system, than about the advantages the rich have ac-quired due to market reforms.

The final four rows of table 5 display responses to questions that get closer tothe fairness or unfairness of contemporary power inequalities: the percentage ofrespondents who agree or strongly agree that it is fair for those in positions ofpower to enjoy special treatment; levels of agreement that inequalities exist be-cause they benefit the rich and the powerful; the percentage who state that theyor someone in their family experienced unfair treatment by local officials withinthe past three years; and finally row 10 repeats the responses (from table 2, row 7)to the statement that “government officials don’t care what common people likeme think.”

The patterns in these last four rows are not quite as easy to interpret as the firstsix rows, and again they involve indicators that are not that comparable. It isclear from row 7 that power holders receiving special treatment is seen as aboutas unfair as rural migrants not being treated the same as urban citizens (andmore unfair than rich families enjoying advantages). The figure in row 9 of 27 per-cent reporting mistreatment by local officials within the past three years in the2004 survey seems very high, and even the 10 percent in 2009 and 13 percentin 2014 seem anything but trivial. About half of the respondents in all three sur-veys agree with the jaundiced statements that inequalities exist to benefit the richand powerful (row 8) and that officials don’t care what ordinary people think(row 10). Overall the results in table 5 indicate that power inequalities are resentedmore than income inequalities, lending support to my claim that procedural in-justices are the more active social volcano in China today.

However, the trends over time in these survey results do not provide clear ev-idence that China’s power inequality social volcano is approaching an eruption.True, fewer respondents in each successive survey think it fair for those in powerto receive special treatment (row 7), but on the other three power inequality ques-tions (in rows 8–10), the 2009 respondents had less critical views than their pre-decessors in 2004, although rebounding to somewhat more critical attitudes in2014.

We also obtained insight into another domain of concerns, popular fears aboutenvironmental hazards, through questions we added only in the more recent sur-veys. In 2009 and 2014 we added questions about perceived vulnerability to pol-lution. The percentage who judged their local air quality to be deficient or verydeficient in 2009was 12.7 percent and increased in 2014 to 22.4 percent. The com-parable figures about deficient or very deficient local drinking water were 17.6 per-cent in 2009 and 21.6 percent in 2014; regarding danger of exposure to chemicalpollutants, the figures rose from 22.8 percent in 2009 to 32.3 percent in 2014. Notsurprisingly, when we added a new question in 2014 about whether respondentsfelt their health was being endangered by environmental pollution, fully 73.5 per-cent said yes. Clearly on the environmental front, many Chinese citizens have a



growing feeling that they are not being protected from harm by the powers thatbe.37

On official abuses of power and corruption, several questions asked only in2014 also raise concern. One in 10 respondents reported that within the last threeyears they or a member of their family had experienced official confiscation oftheir farmland or housing, while roughly the same proportion reported that inthis same timeframe they or a member of their family had to offer a “gift” to anofficial in order to get something taken care of. When asked in 2014 how seriouslythey viewed official corruption, fully 82.6 percent judged it was a serious or veryserious problem. A follow-up question ought to provide some relief to leaders:62.1 percent of respondents said they had some or much confidence in the gov-ernment’s ability to solve the problem of official corruption. However, another24.5 percent said they had very little or no confidence at all.

When it comes to the fairness of the social welfare distributions that the Partycounts on to earn public favor, the 2014 survey revealed substantial popular dis-trust. One of the important policy changes since 1999 has been to develop a sys-tem of minimum livelihood assistance payments (referred to as dibao) for poorurban families, and then after 2006 to extend the program to poor rural familiesas well. Our surveys suggest that 80–90 percent of Chinese should view this pro-gram with approval (table 3, row 2). However, when asked how easy or difficult itwould be to obtain dibao assistance if they needed it, 50.4 percent of respondentsin the 2014 survey judged it would be difficult or impossible. Furthermore, fully67.1 percent agreed with the statement that some people who qualify for dibaopayments fail to receive them, while 66.7 percent agreed that some people receivedibao payments who are not eligible to receive them.38 In short, there are sub-stantial feelings of injustice surrounding the administration of a much vauntedsocial welfare program that in theory should help bolster support for the Party.To sum up, the limited number of questions we were able to ask (particularly newquestions added in 2014) regarding inequalities based on power and about asense of unfairness in how citizens are currently being treated show a higher per-

37. The connection between pollution problems and procedural injustice feelings is vividly conveyed by anonline plea for support for activists such as Chai Jing (the maker of a 2015 documentary on China’s envi-ronmental crisis, Under the Dome): “In this messed-up country that’s devoid of law, cold-hearted, numb andarrogant, they’re like an eye grabbing sign that shocks the soul” (quoted in Christopher Buckley, “Documentaryon Pollution Stirs Chinese,” New York Times, March 2, 2015).

38. An earlier survey in 2003–4 conducted in China’s 35 largest cities produced estimates that 71 percent ofthose surveyed who should have qualified to receive dibao payments were not receiving them, while 43 percentwho were receiving such payments should not have qualified for them. See Martin Ravallion, ShaohuaChen, and Youjuan Wang, “Does the Di Bao Program Guarantee a Minimum Income in China’s Cities?,” inPublic Finance in China: Reform and Growth in a Harmonious Society, ed. Jiwei Lou and Shulin Wang(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2008). Thanks to Dorothy Solinger for this reference and other informationabout the dibao program.



centage of Chinese expressing discontent on this front than are critical of thegrowing gap between rich and poor.

WHY ISN ’T THE PARTY DOING MORE TO ADDRESS INJUSTICESSTEMMING FROM POWER INEQUALITIES?

For close to two decades, Party leaders have sounded alarms about the potentialdangers posed by China’s growing income gap, and they have launched a varietyof programs designed to combat the potential eruption of a distributive injusticesocial volcano. However, the idea that growing income gaps are the primarythreat to political stability and Party rule is a misconception. Our surveys indi-cate that most Chinese are not that angry about the gap between rich and poorand that the numbers who feel disgruntled on that front have not increased sys-tematically over time.

China’s leaders have also warned about the dangers posed by injustices andmalfeasance within the political realm, and they have proclaimed their intentionto promote the rule of law, combat corruption, and undertake other countermea-sures. However, in terms of actual reforms and structural changes, as opposed tosimply propaganda and temporary campaigns, efforts to combat procedural in-justices have made much less headway. Why, if power inequality is a greaterthreat to Party rule than income inequality, is less headway being made to com-bat this danger?

The answer to this puzzle lies in considering what is involved in efforts tocombat distributive versus political injustices. The former require the mobiliza-tion of financial and bureaucratic resources to try to reverse the growing gap be-tween rich and poor, or at least to provide greater relief and assistance to thepoor. As discussed earlier, China’s leaders have considerable financial and bu-reaucratic resources at their disposal, and they have used these on multiple frontsto promote distributive justice. In some cases (as in coverage by public medicaland old age insurance) dramatic progress has been made. These efforts also donot confront strong resistance from entrenched interest groups.

When it comes to combatting injustices within the political sphere, the situa-tion is quite different. How can one combat injustices such as shady deals by of-ficials to confiscate farmland and urban housing, diversion of public resourcesfor official enrichment, local governments’ failures to protect the public from toxicchemical spills and adulterated food products, coercive enforcement of familyplanning, crackdowns on religion, and incarceration of critics of official abuses?What would be required is not so much financial and bureaucratic resources butrather structural reforms that place limits on the arbitrary power of those in au-thority. However, efforts that could in theory be taken to implement such limits—such as by making courts more autonomous, allowing freedom of the press, re-quiring mandatory disclosure of the finances of officials and their families, and



guaranteeing genuine freedom of speech and assembly, not to mention throughallowing electoral challenges to those in authority—confront twomajor obstacles.Such reforms would threaten very powerful vested interests among the politicalelite devoted to the preservation of the status quo. They also would underminethe Leninist operating procedures that the Party uses to remain in power, thushastening the weakening of Party power that the leaders are so desperate to avoid.

Even the recent high-profile campaign against official corruption launched byXi Jinping has not broken this pattern, since decisions about which “tigers andflies” will face corruption charges are still monopolized internally by organs ofthe Party, not made by independent anticorruption agencies operating transpar-ently. Furthermore, activists who promote measures that might help in this anti-corruption effort, such as demanding public disclosure of official assets, regularlyface harassment and arrest. No matter howmany victims this campaign claims, itcannot do much to reassure ordinary Chinese that the problems of corruptionand other forms of political malfeasance have been successfully brought undercontrol. Efforts to combat procedural injustices without carrying out basic re-forms in the structures of power are not likely to make more than a superficialand temporary difference. Unless China’s leaders are willing to change their basicoperating procedures, break this impasse, and devise ways to more effectivelycombat abuses of power and other procedural injustices, there is no guaranteethat they can keep China’s active social volcano from eventually erupting.


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